WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR. A Practical Treatise on Diseases of the Urinary and Generative Organs in Both Sexes. - Part I. Non-Specific Diseases. Part II. Syphilis. Entirely Re-written, with Copious Additions. Illustrated by Coloured Plates and Woodcuts. Third Edition. Octavo. The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs in Youth, in Adult Age, and in Advanced Life. Considered in their Physiological, Social, and Psychological Relations. Octavo. 7s. PROSTITUTION, CONSIDERED IN ITS MORAL, SOCIAL, & SANITARY ASPECTS, In London and other Large Cities. WITH PROPOSALS FOR THE MITIGATION AND PREVENTION LANE LIBRARY BY WILLIAM ACTON, M.R.C.S. FORMERLY EXTERNE TO THE FEMALE VENEREAL HOSPITAL IN PARIS; LATE SURGEON TO THE ISLINGTON DISPENSARY; FELLOW OF THE ROYAL MEDICAL SOCIETY; ETC. ETC. "Had the poets to fable.a new mythology, the Eros of the London streets would be not the offspring of Vents, but the child of SORROW and STARVATION." G7A1 1857 PREFACE. 10 I HAVE often regretted that persons more learned and influential than myself have not publicly attempted to enforce upon the State the propriety, firstly, of arresting to some extent the unnecessary speed at which Prostitution is now eating into the heart of society; and secondly, of recognising and opposing Venereal diseases upon public grounds. Had I been so anticipated, I can imagine that by this time the work might have been well in hand. But unfortunately, the best of minds and the most excellent pens have hitherto refrained from the various topics involved, because (confounding delicacy with difficulty) they have conceived a superstition that they would find opposed to them an array of obstacles, all attempts to pass which would be futile, if not wrong. And thus so very few have ventured beyond the shelter of anonymous writing in the avowal of their opinions, that the topics in question have been avoided, and in the absence of reliable guides, have at last come to be virtually ignored by the public at large. In the course of a special service at the Lourcine and Du Midi Hospitals at Paris, my attention was necessarily turned to Prostitution and its consequences. I, like others who have had the same opportunities of study, was pained when, on my return to this country, I compared the noble public charities I had quitted with our only special institution of the kind, the Lock Hospital. Fresh experience in London also strengthened my dissent from the vulgar error that early death overtakes the daughters of pleasure, as also my impression that the harlot's progress as often tends upwards as A |